The Lion and the Lamb

A Tau Wey piano recital,
appreciated by MALCOLM TROUP

One of life's greatest satisfactions, in which aesthetic and moral values gently intermingle, is to witness a previous winner of major accolades -- amongst them First Prize in the Beethoven Intercollegiate Piano Competition -- continuing undauntedly his further ascent of Mount Parnassus, instead of being content like so many to linger on in the foothills. So it was recently with Taiwanese Tau Wey's magisterial recital at London's St James's Piccadilly (20 February 2006) for the Beethoven Piano Society of Europe.

We had last heard him in September 2005 unravelling the exotic complexities of Khaikosru Sorabji's Perfumed Garden at the RNCM, so were little prepared for this classical challenge of the two Fantasies -- the rarely-heard Op 77 of Beethoven, which was described by his pupil Czerny as the nearest thing to hearing the master improvising in his heyday -- the other the monumental three-movement arch of Schumann's world-storming Fantasy. While the eruption of sudden scale-passages no longer added up to the Jovian thunderbolts intended by Beethoven, even despite the lightning-like brilliance of Tau's fingerwork, and while the tunes were never more than predictable, it delivered the same impact as Beethoven's original listeners must have received.

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